5 ms·

Why is Africa still poor?

15 points by antman 11y ago

x5n1 11y ago
why is most of the world still poor?
- Rhapso 11y ago
  Because the bits of "not poor" exist via leveraging the cost efficiency of employing the poor.
  - mateuszf 11y ago
    Without employing the poor, they would be even poorer.
    - x5n1 11y ago
      Resource capture.
    - collyw 11y ago
      I was reading the Lonely Planet guide while in Nepal (another extremely poor country). Apparently many of the people in the country farm, and the farms are owned by absent landlords. So basically these people are working the land and having to pay 50% of they produce to people not even there. Do you think they are grateful for the "employment"?
obrero 11y ago
Here's a video from 1990 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q6eE9BIUfBg&t=16m43s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q6eE9BIUfBg&t=16m43s Note how he says to Mandela - "the assets of the white people - I have worked for my banks, my mines, my businesses, and my farms". The sense of entitlement he has that the mines and farmland of South Africa are "assets of the white people" is incredible. Also, who was working on those farms and down in those mines? Not Koos van den Merwe, I can tell you that.
GutenYe 11y ago
Because of the politics, image a country runs by a company like Google, Facebook or Apple.
- icanhackit 11y ago
  > image a country runs by a company like Google, Facebook or Apple I believe at sufficiently large scale, i.e. the company's product is the well-being and utility of the population of a country, it doesn't matter whether it's run by the state or a private enterprise - It'll require a huge administrative body to communicate with only a fraction the efficiency of a smaller entity. Big things with lots of moving parts are slow and cumbersome. I'm sure Apple and Google are feeling this already - having tens of thousands of employees to manage is hard. Now scale it for running a country. I don't want to ignore that there are plenty of optimizations that could be made by eliminating political cruft, but a non-trivial level of complexity would remain. That said, in some significant ways the companies listed above will be influencing how a population functions by providing the frameworks for communicating with each other. I wonder if it's a path to self-governance by way of facilitating our policing of each-others actions, interactions and morals while regulating the information that we have access to.
  - bko 11y ago
    I don't think what makes companies like Google, Facebook and Apple run better than most public entities has to do with scale or administration. Private businesses have all the same challenges with building an empire and expanding scale and scope of what they do. The difference is that they have to do this or cease to be. It's a lot easier to push a private entity to the point of irrelevancy when it falls out of favor with its users. Unfortunately, we don't have that same power with governments. Sure, you can vote but the system is designed to greatly benefit those already in power and skirt direct responsibility, whereas the power a consumer has with his dollar is generally a lot stronger. Peter Thiel explains it well when talking about the DMV: > Consider a political analogue using this framework. Say you have to go to the DMV to get your drivers license. In some sense, you, as a voter, control the government, and the DMV is a part of the government. Voters elect government people. Those people appoint other people. Presumably you had some indirect control on who becomes the head DMV bureaucrat. > But that head bureaucrat isn’t who you talk to after you wait in line. You have to talk to the people in possession: the window clerks and managers who actually run the DMV. They are the people who possess the ability to help you or not. You can tell them they suck. You can remind them that, under the theory of representative government, you are their boss. But that may not work very well. There is a misalignment between control and possession. It may not be a catastrophic one, but it is representative. Misalignment often happens when dealing with bureaucrats in government or, say, senior managers in the business world. [0] https://gist.github.com/harperreed/3201887 https://gist.github.com/harperreed/3201887
joseph1337 11y ago
Because blacks are statistically less intelligent and more aggressive/lazy. Many people living in the US or now in Europe with the "refugees" can confirm this. This doesn't mean much on a person-to-person basis but a lot when talking about a billion of people. All the PC leftists can flame me, I don't care anymore. Europe is going to shit because of this rethoric, I had enough
- viraptor 11y ago
  [citation needed]
  - joseph1337 11y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_and_crime https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_and_crime https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_black_Nobel_laureates https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_black_Nobel_laureates Blacks are like 1/6 of the world and throught the whole history of humanity they accomplished almost nothing noteworthy. And the history of Africa. A gigantic, resource rich continent with a great climate getting conquered and outplayed by a speck of land called Europe. Even now they don't have any strategic vision and just sell out their resources and land for nothing to Europeans/Asians. It is the same amognst MOST of the US/Europeans blacks, short-sighted and emotional decisions, or a lack of thereof
    - inflagranti 11y ago
      An the only conclusion we can draw from this data is that black people and immigrants are intellectually inferior, right (and how are black people and immigrant one entity you can just lump together like this btw)? It can't be that they start out in much worse position than most white, western people? And if we really want to apply your logic, probably the white man is much more greedy and brutal and hence can easily exploit the more peaceful races in Africa. But you know what's much more likely than all this bullshit, that is has 99% to do with nurture and not nature and the status quo is hard to change.

15 points by antman 11y ago

x5n1 11y ago

why is most of the world still poor?

Rhapso 11y ago
Because the bits of "not poor" exist via leveraging the cost efficiency of employing the poor.
- mateuszf 11y ago
  Without employing the poor, they would be even poorer.
  - x5n1 11y ago
    Resource capture.
  - collyw 11y ago
    I was reading the Lonely Planet guide while in Nepal (another extremely poor country). Apparently many of the people in the country farm, and the farms are owned by absent landlords. So basically these people are working the land and having to pay 50% of they produce to people not even there. Do you think they are grateful for the "employment"?

obrero 11y ago

Here's a video from 1990 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q6eE9BIUfBg&t=16m43s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q6eE9BIUfBg&t=16m43s Note how he says to Mandela - "the assets of the white people - I have worked for my banks, my mines, my businesses, and my farms". The sense of entitlement he has that the mines and farmland of South Africa are "assets of the white people" is incredible. Also, who was working on those farms and down in those mines? Not Koos van den Merwe, I can tell you that.

GutenYe 11y ago

Because of the politics, image a country runs by a company like Google, Facebook or Apple.

icanhackit 11y ago
> image a country runs by a company like Google, Facebook or Apple I believe at sufficiently large scale, i.e. the company's product is the well-being and utility of the population of a country, it doesn't matter whether it's run by the state or a private enterprise - It'll require a huge administrative body to communicate with only a fraction the efficiency of a smaller entity. Big things with lots of moving parts are slow and cumbersome. I'm sure Apple and Google are feeling this already - having tens of thousands of employees to manage is hard. Now scale it for running a country. I don't want to ignore that there are plenty of optimizations that could be made by eliminating political cruft, but a non-trivial level of complexity would remain. That said, in some significant ways the companies listed above will be influencing how a population functions by providing the frameworks for communicating with each other. I wonder if it's a path to self-governance by way of facilitating our policing of each-others actions, interactions and morals while regulating the information that we have access to.
- bko 11y ago
  I don't think what makes companies like Google, Facebook and Apple run better than most public entities has to do with scale or administration. Private businesses have all the same challenges with building an empire and expanding scale and scope of what they do. The difference is that they have to do this or cease to be. It's a lot easier to push a private entity to the point of irrelevancy when it falls out of favor with its users. Unfortunately, we don't have that same power with governments. Sure, you can vote but the system is designed to greatly benefit those already in power and skirt direct responsibility, whereas the power a consumer has with his dollar is generally a lot stronger. Peter Thiel explains it well when talking about the DMV: > Consider a political analogue using this framework. Say you have to go to the DMV to get your drivers license. In some sense, you, as a voter, control the government, and the DMV is a part of the government. Voters elect government people. Those people appoint other people. Presumably you had some indirect control on who becomes the head DMV bureaucrat. > But that head bureaucrat isn’t who you talk to after you wait in line. You have to talk to the people in possession: the window clerks and managers who actually run the DMV. They are the people who possess the ability to help you or not. You can tell them they suck. You can remind them that, under the theory of representative government, you are their boss. But that may not work very well. There is a misalignment between control and possession. It may not be a catastrophic one, but it is representative. Misalignment often happens when dealing with bureaucrats in government or, say, senior managers in the business world. [0] https://gist.github.com/harperreed/3201887 https://gist.github.com/harperreed/3201887

joseph1337 11y ago

Because blacks are statistically less intelligent and more aggressive/lazy. Many people living in the US or now in Europe with the "refugees" can confirm this. This doesn't mean much on a person-to-person basis but a lot when talking about a billion of people. All the PC leftists can flame me, I don't care anymore. Europe is going to shit because of this rethoric, I had enough

viraptor 11y ago
[citation needed]
- joseph1337 11y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_and_crime https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_and_crime https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_black_Nobel_laureates https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_black_Nobel_laureates Blacks are like 1/6 of the world and throught the whole history of humanity they accomplished almost nothing noteworthy. And the history of Africa. A gigantic, resource rich continent with a great climate getting conquered and outplayed by a speck of land called Europe. Even now they don't have any strategic vision and just sell out their resources and land for nothing to Europeans/Asians. It is the same amognst MOST of the US/Europeans blacks, short-sighted and emotional decisions, or a lack of thereof
  - inflagranti 11y ago
    An the only conclusion we can draw from this data is that black people and immigrants are intellectually inferior, right (and how are black people and immigrant one entity you can just lump together like this btw)? It can't be that they start out in much worse position than most white, western people? And if we really want to apply your logic, probably the white man is much more greedy and brutal and hence can easily exploit the more peaceful races in Africa. But you know what's much more likely than all this bullshit, that is has 99% to do with nurture and not nature and the status quo is hard to change.